Dependencies seem to be problematic -- I once got into a situation where @opentelemetry/api version @1.9.0 was in my package.json but 1.8.0 was getting installed as the dependency of the other otel dependencies, causing conflicts. Cleaning up the packages seemed to help:
npm i --package-lock-only
npm dedup
I use Grafana... at least, I'm trying! Follow the setup instructions.
If you're going to do a lot of telemetry work, it might be useful to keep a collector around:
docker run --name opentelemetry-collector-contrib -p 4318 -d -v LOCAL_CONFIG_PATH:/etc/otelcol-contrib/config.yaml otel/opentelemetry-collector-contrib:0.98.0
LOCAL_CONFIG_PATH is just where you downloaded your config.
Once the collector is up, configure exporters.